Wayne's World

Wayne's World is a real ripoff of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure... NOT! If anything, it's the other way around: Wayne (Myers) and Garth (Carvey), the eternal teenagers with a taste for Lite Metal, were a hit on America's Saturday Night Live well before Bill and Ted's outings. Now they've made the first SNL spin-off movie since the equally fab Blues Brothers.

Apart from providing an unusual linguistic device for the youth of the Western world ("not!", pronounced "naht!"), Wayne's World gave us some seriously funny jokes. As the advertising goes, "you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl"; and if you're a young male, you'll cringe with embarrassed recognition when the dynamic duo hurtle through city streets at night singing "Bohemian Rhapsody". Wayne's World's humour is surprisingly gentle compared to that of, say, Naked Gun: it goes for smiles of recognition rather than boffo guffaws. On that level, though, the movie's a definitive outing in the teen-flick stakes (even if Myers and Carvey are in their thirties)—they've got that party mentality down pat.

Wayne's World has atrocious guitar-playing, fuzzy DIY TV programs, the babelicious Tia Carrere (schwing!), and the awesome Alice Cooper ("We are Not Worthy!"). How can you not like a movie which subtitles its romantic interlude "Gratuitous Sex Scene"?

1993

First published in a reviews booklet of the ANU Film Group.
This page: 31 January 2000; last modified 16 February 2001.